The Bible in History by David W. Kling

Author:David W. Kling
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

A hermeneutic constructed around proof-texts is not unique to Pentecostals. Other Christian groups have engaged in a similar hermeneutic of exegeting certain practices from historical or descriptive passages. One could point out that various Christian practices such as baptizing infants, participating in the Lord’s Supper every Sunday, selling one’s possessions and having all things in common, and the handling of snakes are all derived more from historical precedent than from explicit teaching. But to derive prescriptive teaching from historical narrative is precisely where the criticism has been lodged against the Pentecostal conviction of initial evidence of baptism in the Spirit. There is no indication, argue critics of initial evidence (including even some Pentecostal scholars), that Luke intended to present these examples as models. To so conclude is an invalid inference, for how can one build a doctrine from a few examples?28

As Larry Hurtado, a New Testament scholar and former Pentecostal, understands the matter, Luke’s association of tongues with Spirit baptism is normal but not the norm; it is a sign of the Spirit’s work but not the sign. “The author’s purpose,” he continues, “was not to provide a basis for formulating how the Spirit is received, but rather it seems to have been to show that the Spirit prompted and accompanied the progress of the gospel at every significant juncture and was the power enabling the work of Christian leaders.” In some cases the author describes specifically how the Spirit was manifested when people received the Holy Spirit (e.g., by speaking in tongues), but in other cases he does not (8:14–19; 9:17–19). The primary intent is to show “the validity of the gospel developments described,” not “to teach a doctrine of the Spirit’s reception.” In short, the Pentecostal position results “from zealous but misguided handling of the biblical data.”29

James Dunn, a prolific New Testament scholar who has carried on a lively running debate with the Pentecostal insistence upon a postconversion experience of the Spirit, expresses another major criticism. In his influential Baptism in the Holy Spirit (1970) and other writings, Dunn argues that for Luke (as for Paul), the real evidence and chief element of Christian experience is the presence of the Spirit in one’s life, not some kind of distinctively postconversion experience of the Spirit. The New Testament describes the action and work of the Holy Spirit in a variety of ways but none as a second experience that all Christians should seek. Rather, the gift of the Spirit is the essential aspect of the event or process of Christian conversion-initiation. “The Spirit itself,” notes Dunn, “is the breath of divine life within the believer, the divine action within the human which links and bonds the human with the divine, the dynamic reality of spiritual sonship, without which no one can be said to belong to Christ.” The same holds true of that phrase of initiation, “baptized in the Spirit.” One must conclude perforce “that if a theology of ‘baptism in the Spirit’ is to be based on NT

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